Journey through software development

Clean Coder

Maybe you have heard about the various discussions about Test-Driven Development (TDD). Is it worth it? Does it lead to good design? … In this blog post I will not speak about this kind of practice, just “classical” tests.

When I started my software developer career, I knew nothing about automated testing (unit or not). I wish I did, it would have save me a lot of time and a lot of trouble back then.

The pain of legacy code

I started my life as a software developer in a small company, I had no experience and I was alone on the project, which was several years old. I had to deal with a “big ball of mud” where I was afraid of touching anything because I did not knew anything about the consequences it might have.

Yet, I had to fix bugs and to implement new functionalities in order to improve the application. Of course, I did not test much my changes, only that the bug is fixed or the new feature works as expected on my local machine. And every time it had unseen consequences because the code is highly coupled and changing one part of the source code change the behavior elsewhere.

I wish I had tests at that time to prevent me from working in fear, fear of breaking things, fear of regression. But I’m also guilty in this story because the number of tests I have added during this period is ZERO… My contribution was to make the whole thing worse by adding more legacy code.

I now realise that I was behaving un-professionally, legacy system is a real pain to work with and it is my job as a software developer to avoid creating this kind of mess. We have the tool and practices to make things better, we can add tests, we can refactor bad written code.

Whatever… QA will test it

Now I work for a larger company with several development teams, each one of them has a QA to validate the work done by the developers. I think that having QAs within the teams is a wonderful thing, they will check new feature and potential regression before a production release.

But sometimes I feel like that some developers see this situation as an excuse to be lazy. “I just code, I won’t test it, this is the job of the QA”. What?! Are you serious? Your code does not even compile! Sure the QA will test it and they will just say: “It doesn’t work”. They can’t even test a single feature because the entire system cannot be built.

This might look far-fetched but I’ve seen situations like this one, several times unfortunately.

Sometimes, the code “works” but what has been asked is not done, the code has been written and it compiles. Yet, when opening the page (example of a website), the new element is not present… It’s the developer job to open the site to make sure that it works as expected from end to end, at least locally. Again, I’ve seen it many times, with my own work as well.

In my opinion, QA should find nothing, if they do I have failed at some point. If the issue is technical, I made a fault and I need to fix it ASAP and learn from it. What do I’ve missed? How to prevent that from happening again? Is there a unit test I can write? If the problem is a business issue (not doing was it is supposed to do), then again: what did I missed? Is there an acceptance test that needs to be written? Did I know all the domain related details? If not, why?

Always learn from your mistakes and a feature not validated by QA is a mistake. QAs are not hired to piss developers off, they are paid to make sure the products are viable from a quality point of view. We are not paid to write code, we are paid to automate process, and make them work! QAs are here to help, not to do our job.

I’ve been down this road and this is why I make this blog post, to share my experience and my failures. I love my job as a software developer and I want to be proud of what I’m creating, I want to be considered as a real software professional. There are ways to improve how we work, from a technical point of view and an attitude point of view.

If you are a developer like me, you probably worked on a legacy code based application. If not, don’t worry (or do) it will certainly happen… We all know a project that we fear to open because it is just a huge mess without a single test and nobody really understand how it works, it just does. Every software team has to work in order to prevent the effects of technical debt.

Refactoring a whole application to make the code “cleaner” can take an enormous amount of time, it can be weeks or sometimes months, depending on the project size and complexity. Some organization will incorporate refactoring phases during the development life-cycle. But since during these periods, the team does not provide any new features (i.e. no value), having these refactoring phases is a hard sell. Time to become a Boy Scout then !

What the boys scouts have to do with software development ? The answer is found in their rule :

“Always leave the campground cleaner than you found it.”

This simple rule can be applied to code and especially legacy code, and it becomes :

“Leave the code better than you found it.”

I present you the Boy Scout Rule (BSR) of programming. Making the code “cleaner” can be done at any moment, and it can be done piece by piece, no need to wait for a “Big Bang Refactoring” phase.

If you have a legacy project it is likely that you will have some improvements or bug fixing to do in it. This is the perfect time to embrace the boy scout philosophy. Of course after your passage the application will still be legacy but a bit less, and the next time you will improve it again. The code will become better with time and one day you’ll stop considering the project as a legacy one.

For example it is possible to rename a variable with a more meaningful name. Given the following code to calculate a triangle area :

var res = b /2* h

After the BSR applied :

var triangleArea = base /2* height

This is not much but it will help the next developer (maybe you) to understand the code and its purpose. And next time you will see that this piece of code is duplicate in several parts of the code. Time to create a method then :

You now have a method that can replace your duplicate code and that can be easily tested with your favorite automated testing framework ! I know that this example is really simple but I’m sure you’ll find these kinds of easy “cleaning” in your applications.

There is a type of code refactoring I often use to make my code more understandable and to ease maintainability : moving repeated magic number value into a single constant variable. For example, a few years back, the french VAT was equal to 19.6% and now it is 20%. I let you imagine the pain it could have been to change every “19.6” in some projects where it could have been far easier to use a single constant with a meaningful name.

There are a lot of refactoring techniques to improve your code base, Martin Fowler gives you a list of some of them here.

A software craftsman does not fear legacy code, by following the Boy Scout Rule he will improve his projects.

“The Clean Coder” is not a book about the code, it is about the coder. A software developer does not only write code for himself, he writes code to solve problems, to add value to his company. In this book Robert “Uncle Bob” Martin shares his experience on the mistakes he did and how he changed his behavior in order to act as a professional.

I really enjoyed “The Clean Coder” because it made me think of my own behavior. Do I behave as a professional ? What can I improve ? What should I stop doing ?

This software development ideology suits me, it gave me a path to follow. I decided to sign the software craftsmanship manifesto to be committed and to ask more of myself. Being a craftsman is not an easy task, it is an attitude that has to be learnt. It is challenging and that’s fine to me. I like to be challenged, it allows me to improve.

I hope you liked this journey through “The Clean Coder”, see you next time !

Software development is a relatively new profession, new technologies and discoveries make it changes constantly. Thereby it has not been codify yet, there are several methodologies, principles, practices and patterns. And this is a good thing, we still have a lot to explore to master and contribute to our craft. Yet, this lack of codification allows us to do whatever we want and sometimes in a bad way. We’ve all seen teams that defined themself as “agile” because they do not have any single methodology and use the term “agile” as an excuse for chaos ! We’ve all seen a two or more years project that does not have a single test ! We’ve all seen programs that become unmaintainable after 6 months of coding ! We’ve all seen projects that have more bugs than lines of code ! Somehow this is the cost of our new non-codify profession. Fortunately there are a lot of well designed, covered with tests, maintainable software too. It is up to us to share our knowledge and best practices with each other, it is up to us to codify our own craft.

Even if software development is new, we all had mentors to teach us programming. We learned through teachers, colleagues, books, videos, articles or even friends. Forty years ago when programming was starting all these resources were scarce or non-existent. Uncle Bob (“The Clean Coder” author) had to learn programming the hard way, without all the resources we can find one mouse’s click away. If we work with senior developers or any experienced professional we can ask them to share their knowledge to teach us how to behave as a professional. And we can of course share our own experience with the younger ones.

After graduation, a medical student is not thrown into an operating rooms to perform brain surgery or open heart surgery even if he as the theoretical knowledges to do it. The medical profession oversees education through intense mentoring. Medical students spend a lot of their education time working with professionals to sharpen their skills. It takes a decade and thousands hours of practice to become a professional doctor. Are we shocked by this approach? Of course not, we cannot even conceive it otherwise. Their work is highly important and we expect them to act as professionals.

In the software industry, things are “slightly” different from the medical system. It is no surprise to see “teams” formed with freshly graduated programmers that are asked to build software even critical ones. Of course creating programs is not as crucial as surgery, there is no life at stake. But bad software can lead to colossal monetary loss, Sony is one example of many. Graduating in Computer Science (CS) gives us enough skills to work in the domain but schools can’t teach us everything about programming. Software development is a complex world that evolves day by day and offers us an environment with constant learning. Creating a doctor-like system for our professions is essential to avoid making the same mistakes over and over.

Software apprenticeship can be a three steps journey : starting from apprentice and moving to journeyman before becoming a master.

Masters have more than 10 years of experience and have worked on different systems, technologies and programming languages. They are able to lead and coordinate several teams. They are responsible for the technical aspects of the projects.

Journeymen are trained and competent programmers, they are professionals. They learn to work as teams and to become team leaders. Their experience levels vary among them, there are former apprentices with little experience and there are burgeoning masters.

Apprentices are programmers that just begin their career. They are closely supervised by journeymen in order to improve their skills and knowledges, pair programming is heavily recommended to do so. They learn how to behave as professionals.

This system is similar of the guilds organization during the medieval era. In the real world this system seems to exist, graduates are supervised by young team-leads who are supervised by project-leads. But most of the time there is almost no technical supervision.

When we build software, we are crafting them, programmers are craftsmen. Craftsmanship is the mindset help by craftsmen, it contains values, disciplines, techniques, attitudes and answers. A craftsman is able to work quickly but without rushing, he also know when to say “no” and to meet the commitments. A craftsman is a professional !

If craftsmanship is your way of life keep in mind that you cannot force other programmers to become craftsmen, and convincing them is difficult. If you want them to become craftsmen you’ll have to show them how it is done and the benefits of it. Then maybe they will join the movement.

This was the final chapter of “The Clean Coder : A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers” by Robert C. Martin. My next article will be a conclusion about the book, explaining what I’ve learned.

Your organisation might have several teams and several projects. It is important to know how to manage these 2 areas of your IT department in order to get things done.

In a “project first” environment it can happen that some people will work on several projects at the same time but with different teams. A developer working in this type of environment will have to learn the methodology used for project A and the one used by the team on project B which can be completely different from the first one. He will also have to learn to work in an effective way with the people of project A and the ones of the other project. Making these switches over and over can be annoying or even frustrating. At the end this will result in a loss of focus for the people working on distinct projects.

Forming a team (a real team and not a group of individuals) is a long process. It takes time for the members to know each other, it takes time for them to know each other strengths and weaknesses, it takes time to understand each other motivation. The members will start to form relationships at some point, the team begins to gel. However having a gelled team is worth the waiting, the members will enter into a new dimension, they can do miracles. They will anticipate each other, they will support each other and they demand the best from each other, they make things happen.

In software development a gelled team is not only composed of programmers, the testers and the business analysts are part of this team as well, all of them working with a project manager. They will all plan together, face issues together and solve problems together, they work as a team. The analysts develop the requirements and are able to write the acceptance tests through user stories. The testers will also write acceptance tests from another perspective, they focus on correctness providing failure scenarios where analysts focus on the happy path. The project manager tracks the progress of the team and makes sure that the team is heading the right way.

Once your organisation has a gelled team you do not want to break it, you want to keep it alive. When the team’s project is reaching its end, give them a new one. They already know how to work as a team and they can focus on this new project right away at full speed. These kind of teams can even work on several projects simultaneously once they know their velocity. This velocity is shared amongst the projects depending on their importance and can be reallocate during crisis for example. It is easier to switch from a project to another with the same team than switching from a team to another.

Building teams is way harder than building projects, this is why it is important to persist them and make them work on a project after one another. In some cases they can even work on more than one at the same time. It takes time to build these teams but once it’s done they exceed the expectations you had.

Software are made by teams and collaboration is needed in order to be efficient and to produce quality.

Sometimes we choose to work in programming to deal with the predictable behavior of a machine and not with the messy relationships between humans. But at some point dealing with others is mandatory in order to achieve our work especially with Agile methodologies.

Except if you work for yourself you will have employers and you have to keep in mind that their business is your business. They pay you so their problems are also your problems. Professional programmers collaborate with the managers, business analysts, testers and other team members to deeply understand the business goals. If you do not understand it how can you provide the best solution to the business problems ?

In a development team programmers have to work with other programmers. Do not fall into the “my code, my precious” attitude, it is not helping anybody. Maybe you think that your code is perfect and everyone should do the same. Perfect code does not exist ! Some developers will prefer a strong design over performance and some will prefer the other way around. It is just a matter of perspective. When you build walls around your code and your scope, you are doing harm to the entire system. It can not work as a whole, how can it move forward if one leg refuses to move ? The code of your application is owned by the team, not by the individuals. So code as a team : share your design ideas or your performance ideas, practice pair programming in order to benefit of all its advantages. Write the code in collaboration.

An open-space setup does not make you work as a team, especially if the members are sitting in corners with their backs to each other. Configure your work environment to face each other, this allows you to communicate with efficiency without making you roll your seat all over the open-space. You will also see when one of your teammate is struggling allowing you to offer your help.

Professional developers work with people whether they are from the business teams or their own team. They collaborate to answer the company’s needs and to produce great software.

When a surgeon is operating under pressure do you want him to stay calm and focused or to rush ? Professional developers are calm and decisive under pressure. They have best practices and principles to avoid making mistakes, they are made to be followed during pressure moments.

If you don’t like working under pressure, the first thing to do is to avoid the situations that cause it. As seen in the previous chapter (“Estimation”) do not force you into a stress situation by committing yourself to an unrealistic deadline you have to meet.

It is also important to “stay clean”, do not succumb to the temptation of the “quick & dirty” path. As it says it is dirty and you know you’ll have to deal with the consequences at some point. Furthermore it is not always that quick because the “quick & dirty” approach creates technical debt on your system and at some point your application is just a swamp and you are doing harm to your structure.

Stressful moments are not always avoidable, there are times when you will have to work under pressure. It these situations it is important not to panic, not to rush and stay focused. Rushing will in almost every case drive you deeper into the hole. Instead you should slow down and think of the problem you are facing in order to find the best path toward the solution.

Do not hesitate to communicate to your team that you are in trouble, look for input and guidance, avoid creating surprises for your teamates. You can practice pair programming to help you with your problem. Your partner will see the mistakes you are making, will have ideas you did not think of, will keep you from panicking and more. You are stronger when working as a team so do not hesitate to be the partner when someone else is struggling.

Relying on you disciplines is also important, you have them to give you guidance and they are the most useful during pressure moments. Do not abandon them at any cost, be even more dedicated toward them as usual. If you to TDD, write more tests. If you are a refactorer, do more refactoring. If you write small methods, make them even smaller. You practice these because you believe in them and you know it works, rely on your disciplines !

The best way to deal with pressure is to avoid it but when it is not possible you must remain calm and focused, communicate with others and trust your disciplines.